I've been using Microsoft Teams at my current company and the 'reply' button is a MAJOR problem from the UX perspective. As other people have pointed out, some people choose to reply to individual messages, others do not. It ends up being a mess. I also agree that it takes up a considerable amount of space.

We can already have very granular conversations through the creation of new teams/channels focusing on specific things, there's no need to make it even more granular at that point. At least make it optional for upon the creation of a channel? I really don't understand how this could have been declined, seeing as it's a quite popular complaint.

I agree reply is needed. However, consider reviewing how Slack has done the post and then a thread. I can follow a thread / a post and replies vs a whole channel. That allows me to be involved in a channel topic but not the whole channel.

I have to admit that this is really annoying. I think the problem is that is on the left side of the box which your eyes see first which means your seeing it a lot as you scroll. Just moving it to the right side of the screen so that it's there but it's not the first thing you visually see while scrolling. I think why it's so annoying is that it is visual noise that you have to visual see then discard over and over. The focus should be on the messages and conversation, and taking action to reply to a message or conversation comes after. moving it over to the right would provide the ability to reply and take it out of peoples line of sight while scrolling. I don't agree with removing it or hiding it, but there does need to be change/rethinking here.

So many orgs looking to migrate from Hipchat and having anxiety about being forced to use threaded conversations. Give us the ability to hide the Reply button, and also to completely disable threaded conversations.

I HATE this 'reply' thing. I don't want everything to be threaded. We have used Slack for 2 years doing everything in time-order. If the team chat is a hundred threaded topics, how can I keep up with new messages? Not to mention the wasted screen space. You've got another item with thousands of votes asking for a more compact version of the app. You could at least consider moving the 'Reply' to not take up an entire horizontal row of space. Or make it a mouse-over feature. Or allow us to set a non-threaded view so that it wouldn't be needed.

To me, reply is a very useful feature for keeping chat threads streamlined and it does not occupy too much or real estate on screen ... BTW I use Teams on Mac, not sure if UI is different from Teams on Windows.

Is this a joke? It's not about removing this action but about not wasting too much space! I cannot understand why this is a problem. It should be obvious and should not even pass trough the Teams UI design phase...

I notice that the reply/continue confusion is *still* coming up regularly as a problem. It especially seems to confuse new users, and once a new conversation has been started there is no way to merge it back into the flow of the original conversation. The whole multi-threaded chat interaction is an anti-pattern that needs to be rethought, so that the "reply" buttons are no longer required at all.

Who at Microsoft is looking at this and saying....yes, this is Ok. Let's add a bunch of visual noise in between a conversation because it would make the conversation flow better??????????????????????????????????? Seriously, I want to know who this person is.